Mechanical Collision
by sierra.steinbrecher
Summary: What happens when you try to wire a flight propulsion system into an Automail arm? Stark and Winry are about to find out.
1. Enough with the explosions!

The new guy across the street was annoying. He kept blowing up the front of his shop, and the shrapnel kept getting in her storefront and messing up her parts. Winry sighed as yet another explosion went off. Seriously, not even Ed was that destructive, at least not without a purpose. She put down the ankle joint she was re-calibrating and went next door to complain.

Stark was staring at the twisted remains of the arm he'd been trying to install his thrusters into. It should have been easy to transfer the power source from a suit to an arm, but he was still having trouble. Darn it! He could make a suit in a cave and espionage equipment out of fertilizer! And yet the simple concept of wiring an arm eluded him. He straightened up from his workbench and made for what would have been the door had he not just blown the entire front wall to pieces. Again. He'd have to pay to get that fixed, and for more parts for an arm. He ducked out from under one of the beams…

And came face to face with a gorgeous blonde.

**This is just the teaser chapter. If you want more, review or PM. Seriously, why has no one thought of doing this before?**


	2. Who on earth is she?

Next thing he knew, there was a wrench in the top of his head and she was screaming in his face. "Will you please stop blowing up your shop every hour?! Some of us are actually trying to work!" Then she saw the mangled arm in his hands. Que the hearts.

"Oooooh, you have to let me look at that!" She tore the misshapen mess out of Tony's grip and began examining every inch of it. "Wow, this really is inventive work. Your connective port is way off, and your structure is too, but…" She let out a high pitched squeal. "Just look at that shock system! Were you trying to build a Taser into it or something?" She looked up at Tony who was still recovering from her onslaught. He shrugged. _Well if he's not going to talk… _She got a mischievous look in her eye… _I'll just take this back to the shop and take a closer look. _She ran back to her side of the street, metal in hand and Stark coming out of his shock behind her.

Tony had met a lot of women. There were the reporters who would do absolutely anything for a story, and who he had often taken advantage of in his younger days. They made great one-nighters and their stories were always flattering, but that was all they were good for.

There had been some female…opponents, but they'd been almost as bad, total pushovers with not a lot of smarts to them. And they hated him mostly because he'd… well, you know.

There was Pepper. Strong, intelligent, worried about him a lot, and sometimes a little moody, she was someone worth waking up for every morning, not just going to bed with. It had been her idea to come out here in the first place. What had she said? "After all the weapons, you might as well fix some of the damage." Which was why he was here in Rush Valley. To make automail.

And now this enigma of a girl had run off with the closest thing he had to a working model. Well, he'd just have to get it back and hopefully get a free meal thrown into the deal. He'd only brought so much foreign cash with him, and those wall repairs were starting to cost him. So that was how Tony Stark, creator of the Ironman Armor and its first user, ended up walking over to the flowery shop where Winry Rockbell, foremost automail engineer of her age, was studying his attempt at a wrist joint.

**Wow! What an enthusiastic response to that first chapter! I can't write Stark at all, so I'm sorry if he sounds OOC. Please continue Reviewing, this is my first crossover.**


	3. Equivalent Exchange

By the time Stark made his way into the booth across the road, Winry had already stripped the metallic mess-up down to the bare bones. It would have been fantastic if not for how bad it was. The port and connections were disastrous, but the wiring for power was there and the actual outside looked more realistic than anything she'd made. If you took that outside design and fitted it to a working arm, the results would be revolutionary. And then there was the other stuff!

The arm was designed to allow the energy to extend past the fingertips as electricity, probably as a defensive weapon. Paninya's canon leg was the only thing that came close, but where that worked mainly with explosives, this seemed to be based entirely off electricity. You'd have to be crazy strong to even generate the needed power, let alone operate something like that. Would Ed be able to?

She turned around, eager to go back and ask her neighbor more questions as well as smack him again for his lack of fundamental training. He was standing right behind her, eyeballing her dissection of his arm.

Two seconds later he had a bruise the size of Manhattan on his forehead. "Idiot! You don't try high tech stuff like this until you know the basics. You taught you?"

He got up from where the impact had thrown him and started rubbing the afflicted area. "No one. I've been teaching myself."

"Well that obviously hasn't been working. What were you trying to do, anyway?"

Stark whistled and the only suit Pepper had forced him to bring along for protection landed beside him. "I was trying to turn this guy's armor arm into a prosthetic." He detached the appendage to let the girl get a better look.

She leaned forward and studied the wiring for a moment before asking, "What powers something like this?"

Stark spent the next minute explaining the arc reactor that was now in the center of the suit's chest, not his own. And to his surprise, she understood almost all of it. What was this girl, some type of mechanical genius? But once he explained how converting the arm from one power source to a different one, and formatting a better structure wasn't working so great, she stood up. "Well, if you'll teach me how to wire in that shock system, I'll help solve your power issue. Equivalent Exchange, right?"

Stark had no idea what that meant, but he agreed to it all the same.

**Reviews are my lifeblood. My stories shrivel up without them. Next chapter we start lessons for Stark!**


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